There is an extraordinary moment in Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams when the camera pans over a number of drawings of ancient buffalo all layered over one another and Herzog, in that marvelous Teuton drawl, tells us that the artists who painted these near-identical images lived over a span of thousands of years. Of course, none of them knew that. They had no carbon dating systems. They had no concept of art history. The last participant in the graffiti oneupsmanship that Herzog documents had no idea that he was marring the record of his ancestors and changing the perception that later generations would have about the cave. What the ancient men and women who left those records on those stalactites lacked is known to us modern motherfuckers as the anxiety of influence. Obviously anyone who drew atop the previous buffalo felt that he was adding something to the depictions, but with no other permanent records, that anonymous artist was oblivious to the fact that thousands of years and untold development had occurred between the first charcoal buffalo and the last.
Memory, records, truth and time are humanity's great survival tools, and the reason that people have become so good at staying alive and remaking the planet in our image is the continued refining of these skills. They can also be terrible burdens, curses against individuals and bludgeons against society.
Here are two examples of what I mean, one personal and the other societal.
Personal: How much of my self am I aware of, and how much of the self of which I am aware am I able to control, and how much of my self is simply a reaction to stimulus? I am aware of my tendency towards self-righteousness and aware of my good humor. I am aware of my historic attraction to well-read women about my height and weight or perhaps a bit larger who have long, curly, walnut-colored hair, athletic bearing and a whiff of sadness. One would imagine that all this awareness would have allowed me to develop, over time, a touch of humility and a sense of gravitas and an appreciation for happy, straight-haired blondes who enjoy bad television and move carelessly about the world. The presumption that the memory of negative reactions to my wrathful condemnations of those who think differently about the world than I or my clowning or my disastrous relations with the opposite gender would allow for an evolution in my personality is based on an understanding of the role that time plays in the evolution of a species that it cannot play for an individual. Human bodies experience linear time much more acutely than does the human mind. We grow. We age. We break bones and bear scars. All the while our mind works on unifying the current moment with all those it has taken in before, which it does, needfully, based upon those same prior experiences. Like the fractal image in the caption, the picture grows larger and more complex, but does not deviate from the founding shape or equation.
It's worth mentioning here that I do not believe in fate and I do believe that people can change and change for the better. But I believe that those changes are of degree rather than kind and that they occur after repeating the pattern time and again - that life is not shaped in a Modest Mouse-like "lifelong walk to the same exact spot" but is akin to a spiral, with a person finding herself on the same vector, but with the ability to look back, in memory, and see how the behavior pattern played out previously and tinker with the course to hopefully affect an improved outcome. I also believe that the forces that set us on those spirals are largely outside of our control. Am I innately sarcastic and self-sufficient, or are those reactions that I then cultivated because I valued sarcasm's ability to deflect disappointment and self-sufficiency's capacity to create a remove between myself and the unreliable mass of humanity? Where is the chicken and where is the egg? For that matter, if the chicken (my conscious self) is getting more experience and growing larger, does the egg (my unconscious/subconscious/personality/soul) grow correspondingly huge alongside it? I had one of my usual end of the world-type dreams recently, and I recognized I was dreaming when I looked back on the white smoke wafting from the city out on to the river in which I was swimming and realized that it was nearly identical to the cover of The New Yorker on the 10th Anniversary. New symbol for an old fear, perhaps, but it was comforting in a way to see a familiar emotion in a different guise. Like falling in love again and you know it's real because it feels as fresh and raw as it did the first time, but with huge sublimated fear in place of love.
Here is the societal example, which I promise will be simple and less vague: What does the Constitution of the United States mean and/or represent? If you consult the memories of the men involved in its debate, drafting and adoption, it means wildly different things. It was a codification of the union that the Declaration of Independence created. It was a betrayal of the spirit of independence through the codification of that union. If you consult the record, that is, the thing itself, you can find it to be equally perplexing and self-contradictory. Within one hundred years of its ratification, the Constitution had proved so maddeningly elusive in its definitions of the rights and responsibilities of the various governments it created or enshrined that the country tore itself apart for four years to resolve those ambiguities. How about the truth of the Constitution? We know from the preamble that it is intended to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity." Justice for whom? Justice by what standard? What is the proper weight between domestic tranquility (which would seem to provide a framework against divisive politics) and the blessings of liberty (which include the right to cacophonous disagreement)? Is the general welfare the general welfare of the country as measured in GDP or the general welfare of the country as measured in class mobility? How many of the Constitution's goals are provided by the Constitution itself and how many are supplied by the workings of other institutions that exist because we have respect for the rule of law? Finally, crucially, there is our perception of time as it relates to the Constitution. Could this document have been produced by different men in a different place in a different time? How reverent should we be of the Founders' accomplishment, and can that reverence include revision? Can we be aware of how special and important the cave drawing is and still have the chutzpah required to add our art atop it in good conscience?
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